Cryptanalysis of ARX-based White-box Implementations

Abstract: At CRYPTO’22, Ranea, Vandersmissen, and Preneel proposed a new way to design white-box implementations of ARX-based ciphers using so-called implicit functions and quadratic-affine encodings. They suggest the Speck block-cipher as an example target. In this work, we describe practical attacks on the construction. For the implementation without one of the external encodings, we describe a simple algebraic key recovery attack. If both external encodings are used (the main scenario suggested by the authors), we propose optimization and inversion attacks, followed by our main result - a multiple-step round decomposition attack and a decomposition-based key recovery attack. Our attacks only use the white-box round functions as oracles and do not rely on their description. We implemented and verified experimentally attacks on white-box instances of Speck-32/64 and Speck-64/128. We conclude that a single ARX-round is too weak to be used as a white-box round. https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/10958

Object Details

• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Cryptanalysis of ARX-based White-box Implementations ; volume:2023 ; number:3 ; year:2023 ; IACR transactions on cryptographic hardware and embedded systems ; 2023, Heft 3 (2023)

Contributors, Places and Time

• Creator: Biryukov, Alex ; Lambin, Baptiste ; Udovenko, Aleksei

Further information

• DOI: 10.46586/tches.v2023.i3.97-135
• URN: urn:nbn:de:101:1-2023102519012824699617
• Rights: Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.
• Last update: 14.08.2025, 10:55 AM CEST